Hi,
i am playingthe vanilla game and am about 2 hours in, coming back to my safegame fairly often because at some point i make a stupid mistake and lose my fleet and usually forget to save, so i am back to the savepoint. I am running at this point the ships from the standard start, so Wolf + Shephard, Hammerhead (D) and the Condor(D), as well as 2 more bought Wolfs. I have 100k credits and a great perspective for more moneys and in the Hegemony world, there is a Sunder and another Hammerhead to buy, the latter with compromised armor, for 50k. Now, i've tried both of them out several times now in Run Simulation, usually against each other, to see which is the better investment. Thing is, they both wreck me completly. I am certainly not very good at piloting but i do know what i should be doing, the thing is just, the simulation ships thrown at me competely outperform what i can do to them. If i am in a Sunder, the Hammerhead keeps me at range and shoots me until my shield has to go down or i overload. Getting close enough is almost impossible without dying. If i am in a Hammerhead, i can keep the Sunder at bay but i cannot deal any damage to it. If i let it get into range, it will basically murder me in 5 seconds.
Now, i know that some of this is due to my available weapons. I can't equip anything better on the Sunder then a Pulse laser and 2 IR Pulse Lasers, I do own one Plasma Cannon, but id did not really help me either when i tried it. I am using expanded magazines. Or stuff that is probably even worse for it. Like Ion Cannons or Antimatter Blasters. The Cersion the Simulation is using utilizes an Autopulselaser and 2 Pulselasers if i recall correctly, and muuuuurders me in the hammerhead. I have not been able to emulate that level of burst in my own ship though. Not even close. Instead, i am typically losing the fight headon against any destroyer in the simulation due to hard flux. Besides being bad and not taking damage into the armor instead of overheating and stuff like that, is the difference between the weapons really that big? I feel like the ships are behaving enitrely different when i play them and the simulation does, but that is probably not the case. For reference, the Hammerhead is using 2 Arbalest AC, 2 Railguns and 2 Harpoon MRMs and 2 Vulcan, 20 flux diisipation thingies, expanded ammo and reinforced bulk heads, the rest is flux capacity. The Sunder i tried with every combination of weapons available, probably best was Pulse laser, 2x IR Pulse Lasers, 2 Railguns, 2 sabot MRM, a vulcan, expanded ammo, reinforced bulkheads, 20 flux dissipation and the rest in capacity. Problem was always that the bad shields would make me overheat the second i allowed the enemy to shoot at me without dealing enough shield damage to them.
So, how big would you say is the difference between a 2D Hammerhead and a underarmed Sunder compared to the best decked out variants from simulation mode?
